On 16 July 2014 lexpress.mu reported Mr Goparlen Pavaday, Head of Operations & Support, MNIC, having said that the documents of a person are cross-verified against the data from the database of the Civil Status Office. However, the Data Controller of the Civil Status Office, testified in court that personal data of an individual cannot be accessed without a court order or the person’s consent (except in ‘exceptional’ cases).

Getting access to hundreds of thousands of records is not an exceptional case.

Therefore, it clearly appears that laws have been baffled and privacy of citizens breached, if during the ‘card conversion’ the individual did not explicitly allow the MNIC to access his/her personal data.